I just saw that you’re looking for black folks with experience living as expats. I lived in China for three years and Laos for two years and have just recently written about my experiences and kept a blog during my time in Laos.

Courtesy of Alicia Akins
Strangers always followed me around, touched, and stared. … I’ve read about black tourists in China being put off with the staring, touching, and following. What they’d interpreted as rudeness I saw as curiosity. It’s hard, as Americans, to know what it’s like to see a kind of person you’ve never seen before. It’s akin to how we might react to seeing a purple person walking down the street. I was their purple person.

Alicia’s other post, “The Race Chronicles—Movement 3: Black Beauty,” takes our discussion in a new, more uplifting direction—a black expat whose time abroad was affirming in a straightforward way: “My work in Laos had other positive effects on my self-image and ability to not just accept my blackness but take pride in it.” She continues:

Courtesy of Alicia Akins

Melanin was really to blame both for my hatred of hot weather and my eventual embrace of it. Lao people are many-hued and I found myself admiring the darker of their skin tones. My boss had the perfect skin color and I noticed it wasn’t that much lighter than mine. For the first time in my life, I truly began to see darker skin as beautiful.

I am the lightest-skinned person in my family. My mother and sisters are all darker than me. When I was young, my sisters teased that if I spent too much time in the sun I would get dark and never fade. I couldn’t risk it. I needed to stay light. For beauty’s sake, to be found physically attractive by people outside of my race—and I suspected even within it—I needed to be lighter. Sunbathing? Get real. The sun was my enemy. Colorism and not discomfort kept me indoors. [CB: For more on colorism and intraracial prejudice, see this robust reader thread.]

As I shed my fear of becoming darker, I began to love my color. At 29, I was finally comfortable in my own skin. This allowed me to enjoy all those experiences in the sun.

The story of Kaylee Robinson, an Atlantic reader who experienced major culture shock as a black woman living in rural South Korea, struck a chord with other readers. Here’s Paul, who describes how, in a very real way, he was an expat in his own country:

I experienced something similar to Kaylee’s when my family moved from living on U.S. Army bases the first 16 years of my life (10 in West Germany) to Mississippi—in 1966. This was the last year before Jackson desegregated its schools. Talk about culture shock! The poverty was so great that most kids thought we were rich. (My father was one of the first Black sergeant majors and mom was a teacher.)

Because I’m very racially mixed, I forget some people think I’m White. It bemused me that Black kids wanted to touch my silky, almost straight hair. So yes, it caused a little bit of an identity crisis, but I lived and learned.

The next personal story comes from A.J. Martin, an African American reader in China:

I read about Kaylee’s experience in rural South Korea and I was shocked that she experienced that in a country that seems more open to other countries and cultures than China. I’m an expat in ShenZhen, an engineered cosmopolitan city. But I receive similar treatments as Kaylee’s because I’m not just a foreigner; I’m the only black foreigner many people have ever seen in real life. Many people stare at me every day when I’m walking around, sitting on a subway, even when I’m teaching at the adult language center I work at. I’ve had adult students ask me if I’m from South America, Africa, Jamaica or 2nd generation, because they can’t comprehend how a black person can be from the U.S.—even though the First Family is black.

The only people who understand this are people who received a great education or traveled around a bit. Those people usually translate to others how black people are American or British. I’ve had people ask me if my natural hair is manufactured, yell that I’m from Africa as if I’m disillusioned or lying about where I’m from, and then I’m constantly harassed by people who want to take a photo or video of me without my permission.

Let me not forget the whitening creams I’m suggested to buy by store clerks, or the time that a Korean Airlines employee wanted to know why I was flying into Hong Kong instead of Guangzhou—where most Africans fly into—all while holding my passport in his hand.

It’s exhausting. And my only support were two white American women who worked with me (they have since left) and the black expat groups that give me support and advice. I knew that I would be met with some ignorance and barriers because I’m not fluent in the language, but this is more than I bargained for.

I can’t be myself, and I usually escape to Hong Kong to feel normal or hide out in expat populated places. Those can be frustrating too, when I have to encounter expats from other countries who are racist.

It’s weird and frustrating, but I think this has opened my eyes to how people in different countries view me before even getting to know me. I am trying to see this as an opportunity to get thicker skin, and deal with my own humanity, because it is trying. And I want to learn how to deal with these kind of situations outside the U.S.

I’ve offered a workshop on African-American history, which garnered the questions “What do Native Americans look like? Are they white?” / “This guy is really light; is he black too?” / “What is Beyonce? No, What is she really?” The workshop was meant to focus on the subject lightly and offer exposure to a kind of identity. I’ve also taught a workshop on jazz, and everyone in the room was surprised that the genre was started by African Americans. Asian-American history failed because I didn’t know how to teach that effectively. I hope to find more creative ways to discuss the layout of the U.S. that Hollywood movies in China may not show.

I’m making the most of my time here, and I hope to see more of the silver lining in my experiences before I leave this country.

My colleague Ta-Nehisi spoke last night with French journalist Iris Deroeux about his time living in Paris and more broadly about race in France compared to the U.S.:

One of audience members of that Facebook Live session was Kaylee Robinson, who wrote in to hello@theatlantic.com to share her experience living in South Korea as a black woman and the cultural ignorance surrounding her race in the rural school she taught at. (If you’ve ever been a black expat yourself and would like to share your experience living abroad, please drop us a note.) Here’s Kaylee:

I lived and worked in South Korea for three years, and it was the most fascinating and frustrating experience of my life. I taught myself basic Korean and familiarized myself with Korean culture and traditions. While I was prepared in theory to immerse myself in the culture, I was unprepared for the daily racial and cultural microaggressions that came with being the first Black person that my students and colleagues had come in contact with. For example, after the initial Skype interview, my extremely friendly co-teacher casually mentioned how I was much nicer than she had expected. In fact, I was nothing like the angry Black drug dealers and criminals that she had seen on TV.

I taught in rural South Korea, about 1.5 hours from Seoul at a very small elementary school of about 70 students. My first day teaching the second graders highlighted how important my role was as a Black American English teacher. My class consisted of ten adorable, wonderfully excited students who were very curious about me and English class in general. One student came up to me and rubbed my hand and then looked at his hand: “Kaylee-teacher, brown no come off?” He thought my brown skin color was the result of a marker and was surprised that it didn’t come off. A million emotions and thoughts ran through my mind at the moment, some of which I was ashamed of when I remembered that this comment was from a 7-year-old child.

That same first month of teaching, a colleague asked if I had a gun back home because he thought all Black people did. My 5th and 6th graders didn’t understand my natural hair and touched it without asking. And virtually all of my students refused to believe I was American and must be from somewhere in Africa because to them Americans were only blonde and blue-eyed. Parents were frightened to speak to me simply because of what they had seen on TV shows and in movies. And in a small town, every time I walked out of my apartment building I was stared at incessantly. With such an onslaught of questions about my race and culture, I felt my Blackness being chipped away bit by bit, everyday.

To be clear, I don’t categorize these instances as racism. I categorized them as systemic cultural ignorance and lack of awareness. You can not blame children or their parents for lack of exposure to other cultures. (I blame the Korean government for not embracing cultural awareness at a national level, but that’s another story.) However, this same ignorance can easily be transformed into racism without proper education, as we see happen so often in America.

It was extremely frustrating and exhausting living in my Black body and living this particular expat life. Eventually, I connected with other Black American teachers in Korea and was able to share my experiences and acquire coping strategies. In time, I saw an opportunity to not just teach English, but to culturally educate my students and co-workers simply by existing in my Blackness. I spoke Korean outside of class, I learned KPOP songs, and I tried to always have a smile when answering difficult questions. These actions helped to challenge assumptions and bias attributed to my skin color. Kaylee-teacher was a human being just like them, just a brown version from America.

More importantly, I was able to introduce a few lesson plans on racism and discrimination to my 5th and 6th graders. One student even gave a speech on racism and related it to discrimination among East Asian races!

Through my genuine passion to teach and my fun spirited disposition, parents warmed up to me as well. Though my race became a focal point of my time in Korea, I utilized it as part of my teacher toolkit. Was it stressful and debilitating at times to have my Black body—skin, hair, and intellect—viewed as a teachable moment instead of as a human being? Yes. However, my particular experience of being Black and abroad provided a chance to stymie ignorance before it transformed into discrimination or racism. It was quite a rewarding feat when race relations back home felt, and continue to feel, stagnant.

“It’s street cred—the more sponsors you have, the more credibility you have.”

Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: a shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number six, shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s launch, and tagged OnePlus’s Instagram handle. And it looked similar to posts from the company itself announcing the launch of its new Android phone. Joshi’s post, however, wasn’t an ad. “It looked sponsored, but it’s not,” she said. Her followers are none the wiser. “They just assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t,” she said. And she wants it that way.

Lawyers for retired General Michael Flynn had every reason to celebrate. They managed to get their client—who lobbied against U.S. interests while serving as a top Donald Trump–campaign surrogate; tried to undermine the Barack Obama administration’s Russia policy while still a private citizen; and, as a sitting national-security adviser, worked to conceal it all from the Justice Department—a recommendation of no jail time from the government. But they appeared to have made a last-minute miscalculation that put Flynn’s potential lenient sentence in doubt.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, appeared to let Flynn off the hook for his crimes in exchange for his cooperation in the Russia probe and an investigation into illegal lobbying for the Turkish government that is being conducted out of the Eastern District of Virginia. Flynn is also cooperating in a third investigation, the nature of which remains unknown. Indeed, before Tuesday’s hearing, it had appeared all but certain that Flynn’s decision to assist the government early and fully would spare him jail time. But that leniency apparently wasn’t enough for Flynn’s lawyers.

When a prominent YouTuber named Lewis Hilsenteger (aka “Unbox Therapy”) was testing out this fall’s new iPhone model, the XS, he noticed something: His skin was extra smooth in the device’s front-facing selfie cam, especially compared with older iPhone models. Hilsenteger compared it to a kind of digital makeup. “I do not look like that,” he said in a video demonstrating the phenomenon. “That’s weird … I look like I’m wearing foundation.”

He’s not the only one who has noticed the effect, either, though Apple has not acknowledged that it’s doing anything different than it has before. Speaking as a longtime iPhone user and amateur photographer, I find it undeniable that Portrait mode—a marquee technology in the latest edition of the most popular phones in the world—has gotten glowed up. Over weeks of taking photos with the device, I realized that the camera had crossed a threshold between photograph and fauxtograph. I wasn’t so much “taking pictures” as the phone was synthesizing them.

A muscular public relations strategy is often a terrible litigation strategy.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Tuesday got an unpleasant lesson on the difference between politically effective arguments and legally astute ones. Backed by an array of well-wishers including President Trump, and buoyed by widespread conservative arguments that the FBI had violated his rights, Flynn walked into a federal courtroom in Washington hoping for the probationary sentence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had recommended. Instead he was threatened with jail by a furious United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who accused him of selling America out and forced him to retreat from his evasions. Flynn’s lawyers hastily agreed to delay the sentencing until March 2019 so that he might strive to cooperate further with the Special Counsel and perhaps work off the custodial sentence that Sullivan was clearly contemplating.

Not necessarily the top photos of the year, nor the most heart-wrenching or emotional images, but a collection of photographs that are just so 2018. From Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot to Fortnite tournaments, from the airplane taken for a tragic joyride at SeaTac Airport to a caravan of thousands journeying through Mexico to the United States, from Mandarin Duck to Knickers the steer, and much more. This is 2018.

One of Beijing’s top goals is transforming China into a technology powerhouse, so what happens to Huawei matters beyond China’s own borders.

As Ken Hu, the “rotating” chairman at Huawei Technologies, made the case during a briefing in southern China that his company’s telecom equipment was trustworthy and above board, he did something mundane for many global executives, yet remarkable for the embattled Chinese giant: He took questions from foreign journalists.

Hu’s press conference on Tuesday was an all-too-rare attempt by Huawei’s top brass to engage with the world—and it comes at a critical moment. This month, Hu’s colleague and the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada, accused by Washington of misleading financial institutions to break U.S. sanctions on Iran. Meng’s arrest is the latest front in a multipronged standoff between Washington and Beijing, one that encompasses disputes over trade, intellectual property, naval lanes, and much else.

A new biography squares the decorous legal figure with the feminist gladiator.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not just having a “moment” in American feminist culture. She has rapidly become—in a time that craves heroines—the American ideal of power and authority for millions of women and girls. Beyond the movies (RBG, released in May, and On the Basis of Sex, out in December) and the biographies, not to mention the memes and T-shirts and mugs that proliferate like lace-collared mushrooms, Ginsburg at 85 is also the closest thing America has to the consummate anti–Donald Trump. Today, more than ever, women starved for models of female influence, authenticity, dignity, and voice hold up an octogenarian justice as the embodiment of hope for an empowered future.

Last winter, a recipe for salted chocolate-chunk shortbread cookies spread through my social circle like a carbohydrate epidemic. One of my friends kept seeing the cookies pop up on Instagram and, relenting to digital peer pressure, eventually made them. She brought half the batch to a dinner party, and then it was off to the races. For months, it felt as if every time I showed up to a party, someone else was pulling a Tupperware container out of a tote bag, full of what was eventually known among us as just The Cookies.

The particular look of The Cookies—chunky and squat, with a right-angled edge rolled in Demerara sugar, finished with flaky salt—made them distinctive in a way that few recipes are, which in turn made the recipe, from the chef Alison Roman’s Dining In cookbook, an easy shorthand. As each subsequent friend made and presented their cookies, they’d note how the process went. It was as if everyone I knew had taken up baking. Via the social-media response to her book, Roman noticed the same thing. “It seemed to be a lot of first-time bakers making the cookies, like it was a fun, social art project,” she says. Beyond The Cookies, people I follow on Instagram and Twitter had also started turning out pies, cakes, tarts, and breads.

A trial of seven pro-migrant activists in France exposed the growing divide between the country’s liberal immigration laws and the mainstreaming of far-right views.

GAP, FRANCE—In a wood-paneled courtroom in this small town in the French Alps, a local judge dealt a hefty setback last week to the European Union’s treasured principle of open borders, one that has underpinned the bloc. And to do it, she fell back on a law that dates back to one of the darkest periods in European history.

In sentencing two immigrants’-rights activists to jail time and handing suspended sentences to five others, Isabelle Defarge, the judge, concluded a case that has pitted volunteers from a shelter for immigrants and asylum seekers against an anti-immigration group. To do so, she relied on a provision of French immigration law—based on a 1938 decree on “the policing of foreigners”—that makes it a crime to help a foreigner enter, circulate, or reside in France illegally. In the process, the case has come to symbolize a wider tension across the continent between advocates of open borders and far-right populists pushing countries to close in on themselves.

As internet-connected devices and appliances accumulate, one academic foresees “the monetization of every move you make.”

“Imagine this,” says an advertising consultant named Barry Lowenthal. “I’m a smart toaster, and I’m collecting data on how many times the toaster is used.”

I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”

“It’s street cred—the more sponsors you have, the more credibility you have.”

Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: a shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number six, shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s launch, and tagged OnePlus’s Instagram handle. And it looked similar to posts from the company itself announcing the launch of its new Android phone. Joshi’s post, however, wasn’t an ad. “It looked sponsored, but it’s not,” she said. Her followers are none the wiser. “They just assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t,” she said. And she wants it that way.

Lawyers for retired General Michael Flynn had every reason to celebrate. They managed to get their client—who lobbied against U.S. interests while serving as a top Donald Trump–campaign surrogate; tried to undermine the Barack Obama administration’s Russia policy while still a private citizen; and, as a sitting national-security adviser, worked to conceal it all from the Justice Department—a recommendation of no jail time from the government. But they appeared to have made a last-minute miscalculation that put Flynn’s potential lenient sentence in doubt.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, appeared to let Flynn off the hook for his crimes in exchange for his cooperation in the Russia probe and an investigation into illegal lobbying for the Turkish government that is being conducted out of the Eastern District of Virginia. Flynn is also cooperating in a third investigation, the nature of which remains unknown. Indeed, before Tuesday’s hearing, it had appeared all but certain that Flynn’s decision to assist the government early and fully would spare him jail time. But that leniency apparently wasn’t enough for Flynn’s lawyers.

When a prominent YouTuber named Lewis Hilsenteger (aka “Unbox Therapy”) was testing out this fall’s new iPhone model, the XS, he noticed something: His skin was extra smooth in the device’s front-facing selfie cam, especially compared with older iPhone models. Hilsenteger compared it to a kind of digital makeup. “I do not look like that,” he said in a video demonstrating the phenomenon. “That’s weird … I look like I’m wearing foundation.”

He’s not the only one who has noticed the effect, either, though Apple has not acknowledged that it’s doing anything different than it has before. Speaking as a longtime iPhone user and amateur photographer, I find it undeniable that Portrait mode—a marquee technology in the latest edition of the most popular phones in the world—has gotten glowed up. Over weeks of taking photos with the device, I realized that the camera had crossed a threshold between photograph and fauxtograph. I wasn’t so much “taking pictures” as the phone was synthesizing them.

A muscular public relations strategy is often a terrible litigation strategy.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Tuesday got an unpleasant lesson on the difference between politically effective arguments and legally astute ones. Backed by an array of well-wishers including President Trump, and buoyed by widespread conservative arguments that the FBI had violated his rights, Flynn walked into a federal courtroom in Washington hoping for the probationary sentence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had recommended. Instead he was threatened with jail by a furious United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who accused him of selling America out and forced him to retreat from his evasions. Flynn’s lawyers hastily agreed to delay the sentencing until March 2019 so that he might strive to cooperate further with the Special Counsel and perhaps work off the custodial sentence that Sullivan was clearly contemplating.

Not necessarily the top photos of the year, nor the most heart-wrenching or emotional images, but a collection of photographs that are just so 2018. From Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot to Fortnite tournaments, from the airplane taken for a tragic joyride at SeaTac Airport to a caravan of thousands journeying through Mexico to the United States, from Mandarin Duck to Knickers the steer, and much more. This is 2018.

One of Beijing’s top goals is transforming China into a technology powerhouse, so what happens to Huawei matters beyond China’s own borders.

As Ken Hu, the “rotating” chairman at Huawei Technologies, made the case during a briefing in southern China that his company’s telecom equipment was trustworthy and above board, he did something mundane for many global executives, yet remarkable for the embattled Chinese giant: He took questions from foreign journalists.

Hu’s press conference on Tuesday was an all-too-rare attempt by Huawei’s top brass to engage with the world—and it comes at a critical moment. This month, Hu’s colleague and the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada, accused by Washington of misleading financial institutions to break U.S. sanctions on Iran. Meng’s arrest is the latest front in a multipronged standoff between Washington and Beijing, one that encompasses disputes over trade, intellectual property, naval lanes, and much else.

A new biography squares the decorous legal figure with the feminist gladiator.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not just having a “moment” in American feminist culture. She has rapidly become—in a time that craves heroines—the American ideal of power and authority for millions of women and girls. Beyond the movies (RBG, released in May, and On the Basis of Sex, out in December) and the biographies, not to mention the memes and T-shirts and mugs that proliferate like lace-collared mushrooms, Ginsburg at 85 is also the closest thing America has to the consummate anti–Donald Trump. Today, more than ever, women starved for models of female influence, authenticity, dignity, and voice hold up an octogenarian justice as the embodiment of hope for an empowered future.

Last winter, a recipe for salted chocolate-chunk shortbread cookies spread through my social circle like a carbohydrate epidemic. One of my friends kept seeing the cookies pop up on Instagram and, relenting to digital peer pressure, eventually made them. She brought half the batch to a dinner party, and then it was off to the races. For months, it felt as if every time I showed up to a party, someone else was pulling a Tupperware container out of a tote bag, full of what was eventually known among us as just The Cookies.

The particular look of The Cookies—chunky and squat, with a right-angled edge rolled in Demerara sugar, finished with flaky salt—made them distinctive in a way that few recipes are, which in turn made the recipe, from the chef Alison Roman’s Dining In cookbook, an easy shorthand. As each subsequent friend made and presented their cookies, they’d note how the process went. It was as if everyone I knew had taken up baking. Via the social-media response to her book, Roman noticed the same thing. “It seemed to be a lot of first-time bakers making the cookies, like it was a fun, social art project,” she says. Beyond The Cookies, people I follow on Instagram and Twitter had also started turning out pies, cakes, tarts, and breads.

A trial of seven pro-migrant activists in France exposed the growing divide between the country’s liberal immigration laws and the mainstreaming of far-right views.

GAP, FRANCE—In a wood-paneled courtroom in this small town in the French Alps, a local judge dealt a hefty setback last week to the European Union’s treasured principle of open borders, one that has underpinned the bloc. And to do it, she fell back on a law that dates back to one of the darkest periods in European history.

In sentencing two immigrants’-rights activists to jail time and handing suspended sentences to five others, Isabelle Defarge, the judge, concluded a case that has pitted volunteers from a shelter for immigrants and asylum seekers against an anti-immigration group. To do so, she relied on a provision of French immigration law—based on a 1938 decree on “the policing of foreigners”—that makes it a crime to help a foreigner enter, circulate, or reside in France illegally. In the process, the case has come to symbolize a wider tension across the continent between advocates of open borders and far-right populists pushing countries to close in on themselves.

As internet-connected devices and appliances accumulate, one academic foresees “the monetization of every move you make.”

“Imagine this,” says an advertising consultant named Barry Lowenthal. “I’m a smart toaster, and I’m collecting data on how many times the toaster is used.”

I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”